A Summer Bird-Cage Read Free

about cousins Daphne and Michael and Aunt Betty, my mother’s sad widowed sister, and about wedding presents. Not a word about Stephen. After a while we lapsed into silence.
    I looked out of the window. The country looked so different from the car: it looked unique and beautiful, not flat and deadly. Once one gets through the industrial landscape, which I think very impressive and dignified, the rusticity is enchanting. It was getting towards dusk, and the autumnal colours were deeper and heavier in the sinking light: the fields of corn were a dark brown and gold, dotted ecstatically with poppies. I was moved by their intermingling tones. The sky was purplish, with breaks of light coming somehow closer in front of a sombre, solid background of clouds that looked like plush. Oh, it was beautiful, very much England and beautiful. Why aren’t they enough, why won’t they do, things like that, rainbows and cornfields.
    I always enjoy arriving home however much I hate it when I get there. Hope certainly springs eternal in the human breast, and I think after every absence that my family will have improved, though it never does. A faint warm and cosy feeling overcame me as we drove up the drive and saw Mama, who had heard the car, standing at the doorway. She was so delighted to see me, so touched and excited by my arrival, that I caught her enthusiasm. She always liked me best. I despise myself at times for giving in to the bargain comfort of meals provided and beds made, but she sees nothing wrong in it all. She doesn’t think it’s weak to like being looked after, she thinks it’s natural, she thinks I’m mad to prefer the dirt and weariness and loneliness that I am prepared to suffer in order to gain a sense of hope. It always takes me a day or two, though, to realize why there is no possibility in my home, and so I sat down that evening quite comfortably amid the faces and furniture of the drawing-room to eat my plate of cold chicken, and thought how pleasant and unobjectionable fitted carpets and curtains with pelmets and wall-lights like candles and chiming doorbells really are. I persuaded my father to open the bottle of liqueur I had brought for him, and we drank it with the coffee, and told anecdotes and listened to wedding problems and looked at wedding presents. I had brought them each something—the Cointreau for Papa, perfume for Mama and Aunt Betty and Daphne, five yellow-backed books for Louise and a tie for Michael, not chosen by me. He seemed to like it: it was the only thing I had had doubts about. Some of Louise’s wedding presents were wonderful, blissful glass objects and hotplates and silver. But she didn’t seem very interested in them herself. She didn’t seem concerned.
    I like my cousin Michael. We are exactly the same age, to a couple of weeks, and we got on very well as children. Daphne is three years older, Louise’s age, a plain bespectacled girl, now a schoolmistress, and one of those I imagine who bring despair to the hearts of young girls as they view the narrow grey horizons of maturity through such lenses. It had been one of my only holds over Louise in our early childhood, that Michael was my friend, not hers: when we went to stay with my aunt during my parents’ too frequent holidays without us, I used to gain in stature and to expand, while Louise would retire irritably with a book and refuse to play with Daphne at all. I didn’t realize then, though I do now, that she must have been very jealous of me and Michael; usually at home I was always pestering her to talk to me or to take me with her on expeditions, but at Aunt B’s I had no need to trouble her. Indeed, part of my pleasure in playing with Michael was relief at not having to disturb Louise, who always used to snap at me or bully me or ignore me when I did: but in reality I suppose she missed my timid, obsequious attentions. Anyway, some of the old bond between Michael and me remained: he was a rugger boy, but of the very